Happy New Year!
January 10, 2010
Wow, I took a longer hiatus than I expected to. Sorry about that! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, I’m always glad to spend Christmas and New Year’s with my family. But now it’s time to get back to the proverbial grind.
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Today I feel: middling, for me. No major problems, just the day to day annoyance of having to deal with Crohn’s (my thought as I wake up every morning and have to get myself to the bathroom first thing: “It’s still here? Oh come on.”).
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Just a few days after my last post I got a new job, which has been incredible so far. I worked almost non-stop my last week in the city, including an overnight shift (and all this starting mere hours after my finals ended). It’s great to be getting paid again, and I’m so glad that I got a good job rather than having to take whatever I could get, but they did manage to run me ragged in that one week. I had one 12 hour overnight shift that threw me completely off my sleep schedule, which I found out is disastrous when you take your meds “when you wake up”. I know I missed at least 1 day of meds that week, maybe 2. Which isn’t great when you then have to continue working constantly. On Friday night I managed to get myself into a spot where I had to run off to the bathroom 3 times in a half hour. That was extremely unpleasant. Apparently I was really sick the whole time (said a nurse I saw a few days later) but through sheer willpower I managed to ward it off until the morning my bus left to take me back home. So of course I spent Christmas with a bad cold, which, again, is not terribly much fun and not so good for Crohn’s.
Lesson learned: when you’re most stressed out is the time when you tend to neglect the things you need to keep you healthy, like taking meds on time and eating right. But it’s also the time when your body is most susceptible to bad things happening, so you need to take extra care so you don’t pile on one more stress!
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This vacation has confirmed for me that I cannot eat ice cream anymore. I started craving it and went into the ice cream shop where my sister works, and predictably was tethered to the bathroom all night. I have a theory that I may be able to get away with frozen yogurt to feed the occasional desire for ice cream, because of the different source of the “cream” part, but I haven’t experimented enough with it to say for sure yet. Does anybody know if frozen yogurt is at all better than ice cream in terms of not exacerbating the digestive system?
Girls Don\'t Poop 
January 10, 2010 at 11:43 pm
You might try coconut milk, rice milk, or other alternative milk ice creams. I find that any type of ice cream that’s derived from cows milk dairy (that includes yogurt) exacerbates the digestion. In fact I avoid that kind of dairy altogether. But I don’t have a problem with other types of milk. Turtle Mountain puts out fantastic alternative ice creams!
January 13, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Thanks! I’m kind of a milk junky, it’s my comfort food. I never notice milk being bad for my digestive system except for in ice cream, but that might be because I just drink so much of it that there’s hardly ever a time when it wouldn’t be affecting me. It’s hard for me to imagine switching to a different type of milk, but I guess I should just bite the bullet and try it for a couple of weeks to see if I notice an improvement. Is there another type of milk that you find particularly delicious that I might try?